Is malaysia a country?

Yay, Malaysia, the best disguised Muslim tyranny in the world.

By the commonwealth I meant Gibraltar, Virgin Islands, etc. Not strictly the commonwealth but crown dependencies/directly governed by Westminster.

It is an official name, it is on the front of the British Passport!.

They are interchangeable, but do mean different things. UK is more commonly used now in Int'l politics, but certainly still in the financial world, Great Britain is still used (Great British Pounds).!.

As I have said what I mean British Isles to mean, and you agree, we shall go by that definition.

LOL i'm doing it at the moment. I'm a bit of a Geog nerd, but lots of people in my class are getting A*s with little strain. It's just general knowlege tbh, and being able to write well.

Yay, Malaysia, the best disguised Muslim tyranny in the world.

Yes, but that's not the commonwealth. In cases like these you need to more careful with words.

However, Gibraltar, the Falklands, the British Virgin Islands and the other rocky terriroties we still own are usually no more part of the UK than the Isle of Man and Jersey. Which aren't part of the United Kingdom.

Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands etc. are overseas territories. The Isle of Man and Channel Islands are crown dependencies. They are not officially part of the United Kingdom.

So you're still wrong.



Erm. No it's not. Not on mine anyway. It uses the official name "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".



Yes. I didn't deny that. It still doesn't make it its official name though.



Well, the Irish blood in me doesn't really agree with it but I suppose we'll leave it.

Certainly they don't seem very keen on people converting, do they? And some states follow Sharia Law.

Not that it's really much to do with us any more.

I would think you would be very inclined to get into it if you lived there and were non-Malay.

Fair enough.

You are Irish? Where are you from? I was born just outside Dublin but grew up in Berkshire, so fake Irish really! Only Irish by passport.

Well, quite. It's not really much to do with Britain anymore, but it was a downright shame that the independence referendum polls for Sarawak and North Borneo were rigged.

No. Sorry, I didn't mean to give them impression I'm Irish as I'm not. I was born in Northumberland and I live in Northumberland (almost). I go to uni in Durham. But six of my eight great grandparents were Irish so you don't need to go too far back.

I have strong Irish ancestry (as most do I suppose) and descended from Scottish nobility/royalty don't you know.

I've not heard of that before!

What were the rules on the referendum passing? Was it a simple majority thing, or a majority of states (if they existed before independence)? Is there any way of me doing further reading on this - I'm rather ignorant of Malay(si)a!

Why are you calling it Malaya? That has not been it's name for 45 years now. It is called Malaysia.

oh how posh!

Sorry to have troubled you, m'Lord

I've not heard of that before!

What were the rules on the referendum passing? Was it a simple majority thing, or a majority of states (if they existed before independence)? Is there any way of me doing further reading on this - I'm rather ignorant of Malay(si)a!

Well, I'll ask my dad next time I go there because he only told me the basics last time.

In Malaysia you have three ex countries; Malaya/Federated Malay States, which is the mainland, and then on the island of Borneo you had British North Borneo (this is where my father's from) and the White Raj of Sarawak. BNB is modern Sabah and Sarawak is modern... well, Sarawak. All three of those formed together to create modern day Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah at least by choice via referendum.

In Malaya, the predominant race is Malay and their religion is Islam. However, in Sarawak and British North Borneo you have a large number of indigenous non-Muslims and Sinos, who are very popular with the local indigenous people. If you want to look up an indigenous group, the largest is the Kadazan/dusun, which is my father's race (and thus, half mine.) Now, when Malaya joined with BNB and Sarawak to create Malaysia, the Malays began to take control of all political establishments. Here's an article from Wiki which explains it briefly.

Sabah entered Malaysia as an autonomous state with a Christian Kadazan-Dusun chief minister, but soon succumbed to Kuala Lumpur's vision of a one-party unitary Islamic state dominated by the indigenous Muslim Bajau and Brunei Malay people. This has created considerable friction and even occasional calls for secession. These tensions are further inflamed by Kuala Lumpur's colonial mentality towards Sabah, wherein 95% of the profits from Sabah's immense natural resources are taken by the federal government, leaving the state government with only 5%. Aside from nominally separate immigration controls, little evidence remains of Sabah's theoretical autonomy.

The situation is similar in Sarawak.

By the way, immigration is barely under Sabahan indigenous people's control because political power lies in the hands of the Malays. What they do is bring in immigrants from Indonesia, Malaya and Phillipines who are Muslim and use them as political tools and also to slowly eradicate the non-Muslims. Border control is such a problem that last year when I went, we were going to go to the beach but couldn't because a group of Fillipino drug dealers were angry and, armed with mil-spec weaponry were patrolling the shores looking for revenge after several of their number were shot dead by police. The Army is too scared of them to clean them up. I can tell you for a fact this was not the case when the British ruled North Borneo.

When Sabahan Kadazan leaders were flying en-route to Kuala Lumpur in the 70s, their plane magically dissapeared and fell into the ocean. Recently the Sarawak Parliament was banned from even discussing secession.

Considering that Sabah and Sarawak is controlled by a Malay political party (Barisan National) and is taxed incredibly high, frankly I can't help but make a connection to the American revolution - no taxation without representation.

Now, according to my father, who is a somewhat reliable source (a Lawyer who owns more books than his local Library) the referendum polls for independence were rigged by the Malays. According to him, nobody really wanted independence, and in Sarawak crowds of natives cried when the White Raj left.

(By the way, the Malays are NOT indigenous to Borneo, on which both
Sarawak and Sabah is located. They are an invader race attempting a cultural and religious genocide of the native people there.)

Sorry if that's a bit too complicated. There's alot to digest there

I don't think there are many books you can read on the subject; this is, after all, the plight of half a million people, and nobody cares. However, I would suggest you read Land Below the Wind by Agnes Keith; its her time in North Borneo pre-war and an extremely interesting read for an avid colonialist.